truth and ontology jun 2007

That is, Truthmaker says that for eachclaim that is true, there is some entity that, by its mere exis-tence, makes that claim true.. As we have just seen, the first four chapters focus pr

T R U T H A N D O N T O L O G Y

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Truth and Ontology

Trenton Merricks

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For Emily, Conor, and William

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Much of this book was written during the academic year2004–2005, while I enjoyed a fellowship from the NationalEndowment for the Humanities and a year’s leave from theUniversity of Virginia The University supplied further leaveduring the spring of2006 I am, of course, very grateful both tothe University and to the NEH for their generous support ofthis project

I presented excerpts from this book at the University ofVirginia (2005), the University of Texas (2006), the State Uni-versity of New York at Buffalo (2006), and the Central DivisionAPA Symposium on Truthmakers (2006) Thanks to the audi-ences at those talks Thanks also to the University of Virginiafaculty and graduate students who participated in a readinggroup on the manuscript during the spring of 2006 Moregenerally, thanks to everyone who made constructive sugges-tions, raised good objections, and answered my questions Inparticular, thanks to Tal Brewer, Tom Crisp, Mitch Green,Brannon McDaniel, Becky Stangl, and Cathy Sutton And I

am especially grateful to Mike Bergmann, Jim Cargile, HaroldLangsam, Matt McGrath, Mark Murphy, Josh Parsons, MikeRea, Ted Sider, Donald Smith, and Nick Wolterstorff forextensive and extremely helpful comments on every aspect ofthe entire manuscript

T M

Charlottesville, Virginia

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III More on a Truth’s Being about its Truthmaker 28

II Two Inadequate Accounts that No one Defends 43III Minimal Truthmakers for Negative Existentials 55

I Apparent Advantages of TSB over Truthmaker 69

II Global versus ‘Worldwide Local’ Supervenience 71

x Contents

V Global Supervenience is not Dependence

VI Mere Supervenience is not Substantive

Contents xi

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That Fido is brown is true because Fido is brown That the Trojans were conquered is true because the Trojans were conquered That hobbits do not exist is true because hobbits do not exist And so

on And so we might say that truth ‘depends on the world’.But such ‘dependence’ is trivial No one would deny it Thisbook considers whether, in addition to the trivial dependencejust noted, there is a substantive way in which truth depends

on the world or on things or on being

A thorough exploration of whether, and how, truth dependssubstantively on being forces us to consider questions that, atfirst glance, seem to have little to do with truth This is because,

as we shall see, any account of truth’s substantive dependence

on being has implications for a variety of other philosophicaldebates And so this book examines how theses that attempt

to articulate truth’s dependence on being influence—and arethemselves influenced by—theories concerning, among otherthings, modality, time, dispositions, and the nature of truthitself

The thesis known as Truthmaker is one attempt to articulate

truth’s dependence on being Truthmaker says that each truthhas a ‘truthmaker’ That is, Truthmaker says that for eachclaim that is true, there is some entity that, by its mere exis-tence, makes that claim true Because it is an account of truth’ssubstantive dependence on being, Truthmaker has implica-tions for a variety of philosophical debates Most obviously,Truthmaker is inconsistent with any philosophical theory thatends up being committed to truths that lack truthmakers

xiv Introduction

Typical truthmaker theorists do not see a philosophicaltheory committed to truthmakerless truths as posing a potentialchallenge to Truthmaker Instead, they automatically concludethat, since it fails to pass their Truthmaker-based litmus test,that theory must be false These truthmaker theorists therebytreat Truthmaker more as a tool for doing philosophy—a toolfor narrowing down the live options—than as a controversialbit of philosophy itself

This book will show, however, that Truthmaker is no less

a controversial philosophical theory than are the theories withwhich it clashes And, more generally, this book will show thatwhat we should say about truth’s dependence on being turns

on what we should say about being as much as it turns on what

we should say about truth By the end of the book, I shall haveconcluded that some truths simply fail to depend on being inany substantive way at all Along the way, we shall gain newinsights into the many theories that interact with Truthmakerand related theses

But the book begins with Truthmaker As we see in the

first chapter, ‘Truthmaker and Making True’, Truthmaker

purports to articulate the idea that truth depends substantively

on being And so it is primarily motivated by the intuition thattruth does indeed depend substantively on being and, similarly,

by the desire to rule out theories that violate that dependence.(Truthmaker is also sometimes motivated by the mistakenbelief that it is identical with the correspondence theory oftruth.) Chapter 1 defends a partial account of making true: x makes p true only if, necessarily, if both x and p exist, then p is

true

The second chapter, ‘Truthmakers’, argues that, if everytruth has a truthmaker, then some of those truthmakers arestates of affairs or, in other words, events, or Russellian facts.Moreover, some of those truthmaking states of affairs musthave certain of their constituents essentially Furthermore, if

Introduction xvTruthmaker is to rule out those theories typically taken to vio-late truth’s dependence on being, it must exclude some allegedproperties from truthmaking states of affairs (Truthmaker’sthus excluding some properties is one reason that it is not ametaphysically neutral litmus test for philosophical theories.)This chapter also argues that Truthmaker requires that a truth

be ‘about’ its truthmaker

‘Negative Existentials’, the next chapter, argues that

Truth-maker should not be scaled back to allow truths such as that

hobbits do not exist to lack truthmakers And it argues that the

best truthmaker for all such truths is a single totality state ofaffairs, even though this truthmaker is, so this chapter argues,subject to serious objections This chapter also shows thatTruthmaker implies that each true negative existential is reallyabout the positive existence of something: namely, its truth-maker These results, the chapter argues, are good reasons todoubt Truthmaker

‘Truth Supervenes on Being’ is the name not only of Chapter

4, but also of a doctrine about truth That doctrine says that

what is true supervenes globally on which objects exist and

which properties those objects exemplify; in other words, itsays that all possible worlds alike with respect to which objectsexist and which properties those objects exemplify are alikewith respect to what is true

Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) intends to articulate the

idea that truth depends on being Thus TSB intends to be analternative for advocates of truth’s dependence on being whowish to reject Truthmaker Moreover, it is an alternative withcertain advantages For example, TSB, unlike Truthmaker,has no untoward implications with respect to true negativeexistentials

But TSB as a thesis of global supervenience fails to articulatethe idea that truth depends substantively on being And if TSB

is to articulate that idea, so the bulk of this chapter argues, itmust be recast to say, among other things, that what is true

xvi Introduction

supervenes locally on (i.e., is necessitated by) which objects exist

and which properties they exemplify But once TSB is recast

to articulate truth’s dependence on being, it is not significantlybetter than Truthmaker, not even when it comes to negativeexistentials In fact, this chapter shows that, thus recast, TSBmay not really differ from Truthmaker at all

As already noted, Chapter4 argues that TSB must be recast

if it is to articulate the idea that truth depends substantively

on being Those same arguments imply, moreover, that anyadequate articulation of that idea must amount to the recastTSB or to Truthmaker They imply, as a result, that toundermine both Truthmaker and TSB is to undermine theidea that each and every truth depends (non-trivially) on being

As we have just seen, the first four chapters focus primarily onarticulating the idea that truth depends on being in a substan-tive way, in a way that goes beyond the trivial and innocuous

‘dependence’ articulated by claims such as ‘that hobbits do not

exist is true because hobbits do not exist’ Starting with Chapter

5, the book turns to other philosophical debates As we shallsee, Truthmaker and TSB have implications for each of thesedebates Moreover, some of these debates have implicationsfor whether truth depends (non-trivially) on being

Chapter 5, ‘Modality’, argues that neither Lewis’s modalrealism nor abstract worlds reductionism can satisfy Truth-

maker or TSB when it comes to truths of de re modality.

On the contrary, both Truthmaker and TSB lead straight toirreducible modal properties Thus Truthmaker and TSB havesignificant implications for the nature of modality and theinventory of irreducible properties

‘Presentism’ is the sixth chapter Presentism implies that

there are no merely past objects or events That the Trojans

were conquered is true Given presentism, that truth seems to

lack both a truthmaker and also a supervenience base of the sortrequired by TSB Thus presentism appears to be—and, thischapter argues, really is—inconsistent with Truthmaker and

Introduction xviiTSB Rather than take this to be a reason to reject presentism,this chapter argues, we should instead see it as a reason tojettison Truthmaker and TSB.

‘Subjunctive Conditionals’ is a chapter concerned primarilywith dispositional conditionals and counterfactuals of freedom

Among the dispositional conditionals are claims such as if the

glass had been struck, it would have shattered Counterfactuals of

freedom include claims like if Curley had been offered a bribe,

he would have freely taken it This chapter argues that neither

dispositional conditionals nor counterfactuals of freedom can

be made acceptable in the sight of Truthmaker or TSB.This is not a problem for these conditionals For subjunctiveconditionals are not about the mere existence of something.Nor are they about something’s actually having a certainproperty And so, this chapter argues, they do not need tomeet the demands of Truthmaker or TSB More generally,this chapter concludes, only truths about the mere existence ofsomething must have truthmakers, and only truths about whatproperties are actually had by actually existing things mustsatisfy TSB All other truths are counterexamples to the claimthat every truth must depend substantively on being

Only truths about the mere existence of something musthave truthmakers So we should say that Truthmaker is false

We should not say, instead, that Truthmaker is true but thatits scope must be curtailed We should not say this because,

as we shall see in a variety of ways throughout the book, aversion of (so-called) Truthmaker that is thus curtailed cannotaccommodate what motivates Truthmaker in the first place.Nor, as we shall see throughout the book, can such a versionaccomplish the tasks that Truthmaker has been assigned It

is best to say, then, that Truthmaker is simply false, thussignalling that its motivations are misguided and its workundone And the same goes for TSB

The final chapter, ‘Theory of Truth’, begins by arguing thatthe correspondence theory of truth is false But this chapter

xviii Introduction

does not thereby reject ‘realism’ about truth On the contrary,

this chapter insists that that the Trojans were conquered is true

if and only if the Trojans really were conquered It insists that

that hobbits do not exist is true if and only if hobbits really do not

exist And so on Moreover, this chapter refutes not only thecorrespondence theory of truth, but also every other version

of the claim that being true is a relation that holds between,

on the one hand, primary truth-bearers and, on the other, that

in virtue of which those truth-bearers are true It defends the

claim that there is a property of being true And so it concludes that being true is a monadic (and even a primitive) property of

truth-bearers

TRUTHMAKER AND MAKING

TRUE

A thing, just by existing, can make a claim true Thus Aristotle:

[I]f there is a man, the statement whereby we say that there is a man

is true, and reciprocally—since if the statement whereby we say that there is a man is true, there is a man And whereas the true statement

is in no way the cause of the actual thing’s existence, the actual thing does seem in some way the cause of the statement’s being true: it is because the actual thing exists or does not that the statement is called

true or false (Categories14 b 15–22; 1984: 22)

Some claims are true because a thing exists Truthmaker saysthat this is so for every true claim That is, Truthmaker says thatfor every true claim there is something or other that—just byexisting—makes that claim true In other words, Truthmakersays that every truth has a ‘truthmaker’ This chapter presentsthe central motivations for Truthmaker and begins to explore

the making true relation.

I Motivating Truthmaker

Bertrand Russell endorses Truthmaker throughout The

Phi-losophy of Logical Atomism, insisting that each truth is made

true by a ‘fact’ J L Austin likewise embraces Truthmaker,

saying: ‘When a statement is true, there is, of course, a state of

2 Truthmaker and Making True

affairs which makes it true’ (1979: 123) More recently, a growingnumber of philosophers have been insisting that, for each truth,there is something that makes it true These include, amongmany others, William P Alston (1996: 52), Kit Fine (1982: 69),

E J Lowe (1998: 245), C B Martin (see Armstrong 1989a), and,most adamantly and prolifically, David Armstrong (e.g., 1997and2004)

Truthmaker and closely related theses have been widelyendorsed and nowadays seem to be gaining new momentum.Yet even Armstrong confesses: ‘The truth-maker principleseems to me to be fairly obvious once attention is drawn to

it, but I do not know how to argue for it further’ (1989b: 89).Elsewhere, Armstrong follows up the claim that he has noargument for Truthmaker with: ‘My hope is that philoso-phers of realist inclinations will be immediately attracted

to the idea that a truth, any truth, should depend for itstruth [on] something ‘outside’ it, in virtue of which it is true’(2004: 7)

Similarly, David Lewis defends a related thesis by simplyassuming Truthmaker as a starting-point and then scaling itback in light of various objections (Lewis 2001) Elsewhere,Lewis just asserts without argument that Truthmaker aims topreserve something ‘right and important and underappreciat-

ed What’s right, roughly speaking, is that truths must have

things as their subject matter’ ( 1999a: 206).

No one gives much of an argument for Truthmaker Instead,Truthmaker’s main support comes from something like thebrute intuition that what is true depends in a non-trivial way

on what there is or the world or things or being Truthmaker’sdefenders then maintain that Truthmaker is the best way

to articulate that dependence.1 This is Truthmaker’s primarymotivation

1 Not everyone agrees that Truthmaker is the best way to articulate that dependence Ch 4 examines a competing articulation.

Truthmaker and Making True 3Perhaps we can better appreciate this primary motivation byapproaching it indirectly So consider:

(1) If Queen Elizabeth II had been born in century Japan, she would have been a samurai warrior.Many will object that (1) is not true Now I suppose that youcould object to (1) by arguing that, had Her Britannic Majestybeen born in Japan400 years ago, she would have been a geisha,rather than a samurai But I am confident that most who object

seventeenth-to (1) do so because they object seventeenth-to all substantive claims aboutwhat the Queen would have been like, had she been born longago in the Land of the Rising Sun

Those who thus object might insist that nothing could

make true any substantive claim about what HRH would have

been like, had she been born in Japan in the seventeenthcentury Therefore, they conclude, neither (1) nor any othersuch claim is true This argument presupposes that a truthmust be ‘made true’ by something And so those who find thisargument against (1) compelling should support something likeTruthmaker

I do not know of any philosopher who endorses (1) ButArmstrong, Lewis, and Martin object that some do endorseother claims that are not made true by being (see Lewis1999a:

207) That is, they object that some philosophers cheat byviolating something like Truthmaker Indeed, Theodore Sidergoes so far as to say that catching these cheaters is the wholepoint of Truthmaker (2001: 40) (Later chapters examine avariety of alleged cheaters.) And insofar as we think that thosewho violate something like Truthmaker really are cheating, weshould endorse Truthmaker or some similar claim

‘Catch the cheaters’ is not really a second motivation forTruthmaker, to be added to the primary motivation alreadynoted.2It is, instead, that primary motivation seen in a different

2 I first heard the slogan ‘Catch the cheaters’ in a talk by Sider.

4 Truthmaker and Making True

light For that primary motivation, which is the idea or intuition

or insight that truth depends in a substantive way on whatexists, is not consistent with every possible claim As a result,there are theories that violate truth’s supposed non-trivialdependence on being Defenders of these theories are thecheaters That is, they ‘cheat’ only because they defend theoriesinconsistent with truth’s supposed non-trivial dependence onbeing So opposition to cheaters and the idea that truth dependssubstantively on being are two sides of a single coin

Truthmaker does not require that each truth have just onetruthmaker or each truthmaker just one truth For example,Truthmaker allows that Aristotle himself made it true notonly that Aristotle exists, but also that a human exists And

Truthmaker allows that that a human exists was made true

not only by Aristotle, but also by Plato Along similar lines,Truthmaker does not say that truthmakers must somehow

‘mirror the structure’ of what they make true For example,although it makes no sense to say that Aristotle was ‘disjunctive’,

he made it true that either Aristotle exists or a kangaroo exists.Suppose, somewhat controversially, that a truth can ‘corre-spond’ to something that does not mirror its structure More

to the point, suppose that each truth does indeed correspond tosomething, which something is thereby that truth’s truthmak-

er This suggests a connection between Truthmaker and the

‘correspondence theory of truth’ In fact, some philosopherstake Truthmaker just to be the correspondence theory Here isJohn Bigelow: ‘The hallowed path from language to universals

has been by way of the correspondence theory of truth: the doctrine

that whenever something is true, there must be something inthe world which makes it true I will call this the Truthmakeraxiom’ (1988: 122)

David Armstrong (1997: 128–31; 2000: 150; 2004: 16–17), GeorgeMolnar (2000: 85), and Alex Oliver (1996: 69) also identify Truth-maker with the correspondence theory The best reason forthinking they are right is that familiar questions about the

Truthmaker and Making True 5correspondence theory seem to be equivalent to familiar ques-

tions about Truthmaker Compare: ‘What is the corresponding

to relation?’ and ‘What is the making true relation?’ Or: ‘To

what do negative existential truths (e.g., that hobbits do not

exist) correspond?’ and ‘What are the truthmakers for negative

existential truths?’

So suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the dence theory is Truthmaker by another name (But it is not; see

correspon-§IV and Ch.2, §IV.) Then to take the correspondence theory

as a premiss and Truthmaker as a conclusion is to beg the tion So there is no good argument from the correspondencetheory to Truthmaker Nevertheless, the correspondence the-ory might be a particularly effective way to express the intuitionthat truth depends on being, an intuition that Truthmaker pur-ports to clarify Now we are back to the primary motivation forTruthmaker: the intuition that truth depends on being—and

ques-so to violate this dependence is to cheat

II Necessitarianism and Conditional Necessitarianism

Necessitarianism says that a truthmaker necessitates that which

it makes true That is, necessitarianism says that, for all x and all p, x is a truthmaker for p only if x’s mere existence

is metaphysically sufficient for p’s truth Necessitarianism’s

defenders include David Armstrong (2003: 12; 2004: 6–7), KitFine (1982: 69), John F Fox (1987: 189),George Molnar (2000:84), and Barry Smith (1999: 276) Understood as a necessary

condition for making true, necessitarianism is now truthmaker

6 Truthmaker and Making True

implications of necessitarianism, and what motivates tarianism in the first place This will involve a lot of detail aboutwhat, at times, might seem like fairly narrow and somewhattechnical issues But these details must be addressed, sinceonly by fully understanding necessitarianism can we hope tounderstand Truthmaker itself For necessitarianism offers (by

necessi-far) the least controversial necessary condition for making true,

the relation at the heart of Truthmaker

In fact, necessitarianism is the only widely endorsed claimamong truthmaker theorists that begins to take Truthmakerfrom a rough idea—the idea that every truth is ‘made true’ bysomething—to a clearly formulated thesis Moreover, as weshall see in later chapters, truthmaker theorists actually charge

a view with cheating just in case that view is committed totruths that are not necessitated by what exists Without neces-sitarianism, the cheater-catching business, as it has actuallybeen run, is bankrupt

Our examination of necessitarianism begins with a look

at one of its apparent implications, an implication regardingthe primary bearers of truth Truthmaker itself seems to be

neutral with respect to those primary bearers Qua truthmaker

theorist, so it seems, one could take them to be abstractpropositions or beliefs or sentence tokens or what have you.But if necessitarianism really is part and parcel of Truthmaker,Truthmaker arguably delivers a direct argument for abstractpropositions.4

That argument begins with:

(2) At least one electron exists

When it comes to truthmakers for (2), we have an ment of riches Each and every electron does the trick Thus

embarrass-electron E does the trick Given necessitarianism, truthmakers

4 I shall say that propositions are ‘abstract’ if they have no spatial location and cannot be identified with sentences (or other linguistic items) or beliefs And I shall assume that abstract propositions exist necessarily.

Truthmaker and Making True 7necessitate their respective truths So, in every world in which

E exists, (2) is true.5

(2) is true in every world in which E exists So (2) is true in

W , which contains only E (and whatever E necessitates) W is

bereft of language and believers So, in W , (2) itself is neither

a linguistic item nor a belief It seems that that truth couldonly be an abstract proposition In this way, Truthmaker com-bined with necessitarianism seems to lead directly to abstractpropositions

This sort of argument, which relies on necessitarianism,has vexed some truthmaker theorists.6 So it would be nice

to avoid it altogether Happily, we can offer a substitute fornecessitarianism that undermines this argument, even whileaccommodating what motivates necessitarianism

Let conditional necessitarianism be the denial of anism conjoined with the claim that, for all x and p, if x is a truthmaker for p, then, necessarily, if both x and p exist, then p

necessitari-is true.7 The conditional necessitarian can say that while E is

5 I assume that electrons are essentially electrons (If E is possibly a proton, then

it is possible for E to exist but (2) be false.) Those who reject this assumption can replace (2) with, for example, that at least one thing that is possibly an electron exists.

6 David Armstrong endorses ‘naturalism’, which he takes to be the thesis that

‘the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system’ (1997: 5) And he says: ‘no Naturalist can be happy with a realm of [abstract] propositions’ (1997: 131) But Armstrong also says:

Notice that Necessitarianism seems to require that we take truths as propositions rather than as beliefs, statements, and such Truthmakers, entities in the world, can hardly necessitate beliefs and statements about these entities, generally at

least What are propositions, then? I think that they are the intentional objects

of actual or possible beliefs, statements and so on I hope to give a naturalist, empiricist and, to a degree, deflationary account of intentional objects All this, however, must be left aside here (2003: 12)

In a more recent work, Armstrong says that propositions cannot be actual intentional objects, since there are worlds with propositions but no intentional

objects Thus he says, ‘propositions taken as possible intentional objects are the only things that truthmakers can actually necessitate’ (2004: 16).

7 Conditional necessitarianism is equivalent to the claim that if x is a truthmaker for p, then it is impossible that x exist and p have a truth-value other than true (or

8 Truthmaker and Making True

a truthmaker for (2), E would not make (2) true in a world in

which E alone (and all that E alone necessitates) exists For in

that world neither (2) nor any other truth-bearer would exist

to be made true

It is easy to see that conditional necessitarianism underminesthe above argument for abstract propositions What is notyet clear is that conditional necessitarianism accommodateswhat motivates necessitarianism For we have yet to examinethose motivations Let us start our examination with this from

Armstrong’s Truth and Truthmakers:

But what is the argument for saying that a truthmaker must

neces-sitate a truth it is truthmaker for? Here is an argument by reductio Suppose that a suggested truthmaker T for a certain truth p fails

to necessitate that truth There will then be at least the possibility

that T should exist and yet the proposition p not be true This

strongly suggests that there ought to be some further condition

that must be satisfied in order for p to be true [Let this condition

be] the existence of a further entity, U … [Then] T + U would

appear to be the true and necessitating truthmaker for p (2004:

6–7; see also Armstrong 1997: 115–16; Bigelow 1988: 126; and Molnar 2000: 84) 8

Consider a putative truthmaker T for a proposition p Suppose that T fails to necessitate p’s truth Then, Armstrong assumes,

lack a truth-value altogether) Armstrong endorses something close to conditional necessitarianism when he says: ‘if a certain truthmaker makes a certain truth true, then there is no alternative world where that truthmaker exists but that truth

is a false proposition’ ( 1997: 115) Oddly, Armstrong identifies this thesis with necessitarianism.

8 In fact, Armstrong’s argument is a bit more complicated than this He says: This [further] condition must either be the existence of a further entity, U, or a

further truth, q In the first of these cases, T+ U would appear to be the true and

necessitating truthmaker for p … In the second case, q either has a truthmaker, V,

or it does not Given that q has a truthmaker, then the T+ U case is reproduced.

Suppose q lacks a truthmaker, then there are truths without truthmakers (2004: 7)

I do not think that this complication involving q makes a fundamental difference

to Armstrong’s argument For, as Armstrong himself says, assuming that q has a

truthmaker, ‘the T + U case is reproduced’.

Truthmaker and Making True 9

T can be combined with some U to yield an entity whose

existence is sufficient for p’s truth, which new entity is p’s bona

fide truthmaker Thus Armstrong assumes that for any true p,

there is always some entity (such as T + U ) that is suitable for making p true and whose mere existence necessitates p’s

truth This assumption is a poor premiss in an argument fornecessitarianism, since only someone already committed tonecessitarianism would find that assumption attractive

Armstrong’s comments do, however, inspire a more sive argument Suppose there are two ‘contenders’ to be the

persua-truthmaker for p : T + U, which necessitates p, and T alone,

which does not Even those on the fence about truthmakernecessitarianism might agree that, everything else being equal,

T + U, in virtue of necessitating p, has a better claim to making

p true than does T We should ask why T + U, in virtue of necessitating p, has the better claim One plausible answer is that such necessitation is at least partly constitutive of making

true, which would imply necessitarianism.

Those who deny that p is an abstract proposition might balk

at supposing that T + U really could necessitate p But they will allow T + U to conditionally necessitate p And I think

it is plausible that if T + U conditionally necessitates p, but

T does not, then T + U has a leg up on T with respect to being p’s truthmaker This can lead us to conclude that condi-

tional necessitation is at least partly constitutive of making true.

This argument for conditional necessitarianism seems to be

no less compelling than the previous argument for anism Moreover, this argument seems to accommodate whatintuitively motivates that previous argument

necessitari-Here is another argument for necessitarianism Recall:(2) At least one electron exists

Electron E’s making (2) true is a paradigm case of truthmaking And surely—so this argument goes—E necessitates (2) For suppose, for reductio, that it did not That is, suppose that,

10 Truthmaker and Making True

possibly, E exists and (2) fails to be true This implies that, possibly, E exists and (2) is false But that implication is absurd;

it is absurd to say both that an electron exists and also that

it is false that at least one electron exists So E necessitates

(2) And, given that E’s making (2) true is a paradigmaticcase of truthmaking, the result here generalizes Therefore,necessitarianism is true

Those who do not already accept the existence of abstract

propositions can resist the above reductio For suppose that

(2) is not an abstract proposition Suppose that (2) exists

con-tingently This suggests that, possibly, E exists and (2) does

not Suppose that is indeed possible If (2) does not exist, then(2) has no properties, and so no truth-value So we can now

conclude that, possibly, E exists and (2) is neither true nor false.

In this way, those who deny that (2) is an abstract propositioncan reject as invalid the above argument’s move from ‘possibly,

E exists and ( 2) fails to be true’ to ‘possibly, E exists and (2) is

false’

The above argument by reductio should persuade only those

already committed to abstract propositions So that argumentfails Nevertheless, there is something to be learned from thatargument It is that whether or not we are initially inclined tothink that truth-bearers exist necessarily, we should all agree

that necessarily, if both E and ( 2) exist, then (2) is true.9And this

is of course what conditional necessitarianism demands So Ithink that truthmaker theorists ought to reject straight neces-sitarianism only if they embrace conditional necessitarianism.For truthmaker theorists should say that every truth stands tosomething or other in the way that (2) stands to E

If there are abstract propositions, conditional

necessitarian-ism collapses into straight necessitariannecessitarian-ism (If x and p exist

9 Suppose you take the primary truth-bearers to be sentence tokens Arguably,

sentence tokens have their meanings contingently So you may want to say: if E

exists and (2) exists and (2) means that E exists, then (2) is true I’ll ignore this complication in what follows.

Truthmaker and Making True 11

ends up collapsing, since p exists of necessity, into if x exists.)

On the other hand, if there are no abstract propositions, ditional necessitarianism is the better option, since straightnecessitarianism is arguably committed to such propositions

con-In what follows, I shall not make much of the differencebetween necessitarianism and conditional necessitarianism.Nor do the arguments that follow usually turn on the nature

of the primary bearers of truth But, for what it is worth, I shall

be thinking of truths as true abstract propositions, and shalloften refer to them with italicized that-clauses

III Truthmaker and de re Modality

Necessitarianism says that, for all x and all p, if x makes p true, it is not possible that x exist and p fail to be true It says, in other words, that if x is a truthmaker for p, then

x is essentially such that p is true Something similar goes

for conditional necessitarianism So Truthmaker, given either

version of necessitarianism, is committed to de re modality.

John Bigelow’s account of the necessitation involved intruthmaking parts ways with both varieties of necessitarianism

For Bigelow’s account invokes only de dicto modality Bigelow

says: ‘I suppose that entailment is to be a relation betweenpropositions (whatever they are) Truthmaker should not be

construed as saying that an object entails a truth; rather, it requires that the proposition that the object exists entails the

truth in question’ (Bigelow 1988: 126) Bigelow agrees withother truthmaker theorists that an object can be a truthmaker.And he agrees with necessitarianism that an object’s existencesomehow necessitates any claim that it makes true But heglosses the relevant necessitation in terms of entailment: an

object O thus necessitates p if and only if that O exists entails p.10

10 Bigelow also suggests that truthmaker necessitarianism says that an object entails a truth But necessitarianism does not say this Necessitarianism says,

12 Truthmaker and Making True

There are three reasons that Bigelow’s account of the

neces-sitation involved in truthmaking should not supplant de re

necessitation by truthmakers (I have no objection to whatBigelow says, qualified as suggested by Fox below, if taken

merely as a corollary of de re necessitation.) These three

rea-sons will not only reveal problems with Bigelow’s approach, but

will also reinforce Truthmaker’s commitment to de re modality,

which is of particular importance later in the book (Ch.5, §IV)

First, Aristotle was a truthmaker for that Aristotle exists This means that, in some sense, Aristotle necessitated that

Aristotle exists Bigelow would reduce the necessitation here

to the logical triviality that that Aristotle exists entails that

Aristotle exists No one denies that triviality But the idea that

Aristotle necessitated a claim that he made true is supposed to

be substantive, something one could at least in principle deny

So Bigelow’s claim about entailment does not capture all thatthere is to a truthmaker’s necessitating that which it makes true.Here is a second objection to Bigelow The relation of

making true holds between each truthmaker and that which it

makes true The relation of making true often relates an object

and a claim But the only necessitation that Bigelow recognizes

in the neighbourhood of truthmaking is entailment That sort

of necessitation cannot relate an object and a claim So that

sort of necessitation cannot be an ingredient in making true So

Bigelow’s remarks about entailment are not aimed at

elucidat-ing the makelucidat-ing true relation He has changed the subject on us.

Look at this second objection this way Truthmaker is posed to articulate the idea that truth depends on being Thechunk of being on which a truth depends—its truthmaker—isnot typically a proposition at all For example, return to Aris-

sup-totle and that Arissup-totle exists The truth of the latter supposedly

somehow depended on the former We do nothing to articulate

instead, only that if an object makes p true, then that object is essentially such that p is true.

Truthmaker and Making True 13the dependence of the truth of this claim on that person by

saying that that Aristotle exists entails that Aristotle exists Again,

Bigelow has changed the subject on us

My third objection to Bigelow’s account starts with the

observation that that the smartest man living in Greece exists entails that someone lives in Greece And so Bigelow’s account implies that the smartest man living in Greece necessitates that

someone lives in Greece Suppose that Aristotle was the smartest

man living in Greece Then Bigelow’s account implies that

Aristotle necessitated that someone lives in Greece But Bigelow

has led us astray For the existence of Aristotle is consistentwith Greece’s being uninhabited, and so consistent with the

falsity of that someone lives in Greece Thus Aristotle did not necessitate that someone lives in Greece.

We could tweak Bigelow’s account to avoid this third

objec-tion by following John F Fox: ‘ … a’s existing necessitates that

p just when ‘a exists’ entails that p … nothing hangs on the way a is named or described; the necessity intended is de re, not de dicto So truthmaker is essentialist in Quine’s sense’ (Fox 1987: 189; see also Sider 2003: 182–3) Suppose that ‘T’ directly refers to T Let q be the proposition expressed by ‘T exists’ Then we could say that T necessitates whatever is entailed by

q This suggests a restriction of Bigelow’s formula that avoids

the unacceptable result that Aristotle necessitated that someone

lives in Greece.

But this is all needlessly roundabout For, as Fox notes, this

roundabout approach invokes de re modality And once maker theorists are committed to de re modality, they might as

truth-well revert to necessitarianism (or to conditional

necessitarian-ism): for all x and all p, x makes p true only if, necessarily, if x exists (and p exists) then p is true.11Moreover, necessitarianism

11 Immediately following the passage quoted above, Fox ( 1987: 189) says: ‘So it

can be reformulated thus: If p, then some x exists such that x’s existing necessitates that p.’

14 Truthmaker and Making True

(straight or conditional) allows Aristotle’s necessitation of that

Aristotle exists to have been more than a logical triviality.

Bigelow’s account, even when tweaked `a la Fox, does not allow

this Finally, and again unlike Bigelow’s account even whentweaked, necessitarianism allows a truthmaker itself to neces-

sitate that which it makes true, thus permitting making true to

be at least partly a matter of some sort of necessitation.This last point is particularly important Truthmaker just

is the thesis that for each truth there is some entity x that stands in the making true relation to that truth Unless we say something about the analysis of making true—as both

kinds of necessitarianism do and as Bigelow’s account doesnot—we have hardly any content to Truthmaker itself Anearly empty version of Truthmaker neither articulates truth’sdependence on being nor effectively catches cheaters So, forthis reason, as well as for the other reasons found in this and thepreceding section, I shall proceed on the standard assumption

that, according to Truthmaker, de re necessitation (or de re conditional necessitation) is at least one ingredient of making

true.

IV Truthmaker and the Correspondence Theory

It is hard to say anything entirely uncontroversial about thecorrespondence theory of truth But here is my best shot: anecessary condition for being the correspondence theory of

truth is being a theory of truth That is, the correspondence theory must, at the very least, offer an analysis of being true.

This necessary condition is all we need to refute those who saythat Truthmaker is one and the same as the correspondencetheory

Consider again:

(1) If Queen Elizabeth II had been born in century Japan, she would have been a samurai warrior

seventeenth-Truthmaker and Making True 15Truthmaker says that (1) is true only if some entity or otherexists that makes (1) true Thus Truthmaker says that (1) has acertain ontological commitment And Truthmaker purports toreveal (1) to be not true if this commitment is not met.

More generally, Truthmaker says that every claim has logical commitments of a certain sort And Truthmaker catchescheaters who fail to meet those ontological commitments Butnone of these claims about ontological commitment amountto—or even look remotely like—a theory of the nature oftruth (see Bigelow1988: 127; McGrath 1997: 88–9; Beebee andDodd 2005: 13–14) Because Truthmaker offers no analysis of

onto-being true, Truthmaker is not the correspondence theory of

truth

There is a second reason to distinguish Truthmaker fromthe correspondence theory For starters, recall that an entity’snecessitating a proposition just is that entity’s being essential-

ly such that that proposition is true Therefore this sort of necessitation is analysed in terms of, among other things, being

true (The same goes for conditional necessitation.) As we saw

above, making true itself is at least partly analysed in terms of this sort of necessitation Thus making true itself is analysed,

in part, in terms of being true Therefore, being true cannot be analysed in terms of making true, lest that analysis be viciously

circular

Truth cannot be analysed in terms of making true But

cor-respondence theorists say that truth is analysed in terms of

corresponding to So correspondence theorists must insist that making true is not one and the same thing as corresponding to.

Suppose they are right Then Truthmaker is not the

corre-spondence theory of truth For the identity of making true with

corresponding to is essential to the idea that Truthmaker just is

the correspondence theory by another name

We have seen that one common motivation for maker—that Truthmaker is one and the same as the corres-pondence theory (§I)—is simply mistaken Moreover, as we

Truth-16 Truthmaker and Making True

shall see in the next chapter (Ch.2, §IV), even the weaker claimthat the correspondence theory entails Truthmaker is false.Besides, even if the correspondence theory did entail Truth-maker, that would not show that Truthmaker is correct For,

as we shall see in Chapter8 (§I), the correspondence theory oftruth is false

2 TRUTHMAKERS

This chapter defends the following: Truthmaker requiresstates of affairs, among other things, to serve as truthmakers;truthmaking states of affairs have certain of their constituentsessentially; a truth is ‘about’ its truthmaker; and some proper-ties are not fit to be the constituents of truthmaking states ofaffairs

In combination, this chapter’s conclusions present a clearpicture of what truthmakers must be like In other words,they present a clear picture of the sorts of entities to whichTruthmaker is committed Moreover, the conclusion that atruth is ‘about’ its truthmaker implies that there is more to the

relation of making true than just necessitation.

I States of Affairs as Truthmakers

Some truthmakers are humdrum and uncontroversial

Consid-er Fido the dog Fido is a truthmakConsid-er for that Fido exists But

not all alleged truthmakers are as pedestrian as Fido Supposethat Fido is brown Then the following is true:

(1) Fido is brown

Fido is contingently brown He could have been black Suppose

he had been Then Fido would have existed, but (1) would have

made true by some thing or things If so, then Truthmaker

allows that there are some truths such that, for each of thosetruths, there is nothing that, simply by existing, necessitatesthat truth But Truthmaker then insists that, for each of thosetruths, there are some things such that, necessarily, if all ofthem exist, then that truth is true With this in mind, one mightsuggest that (1)’s joint truthmakers are Fido and the property

of being brown But that will not work For it is possible for

both Fido and that property to exist even if the former fails toexemplify the latter, even if (1) is false

David Armstrong would say that the truthmaker for (1) is astate of affairs This state of affairs is not supposed to be anabstract entity that exists necessarily, whether or not it ‘obtains’.For Armstrong’s states of affairs are not the ‘states of affairs’

of Alvin Plantinga (1974) or Roderick Chisholm (1976) Instead,Armstrong’s states of affairs are complex entities constituted

by objects and properties

As Armstrong (1997: 5) explicitly notes, his states of affairsjust are Bertrand Russell’s facts Armstrong takes an object’sexemplifying a property to be a paradigmatic state of affairs.Similarly, Russell tells us: ‘The simplest imaginable facts arethose which consist in the possession of a quality by someparticular thing’ (1985: 59; see also Russell 1907: 45; 1919: 1–6).One thing’s being related to another thing is an example of amore complex fact or state of affairs

Armstrong’s states of affairs and Russell’s facts are alsoevents, at least given one very familiar way of understanding

events Thus Russell’s The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

illus-trates J M Shorter’s observation that ‘the word ‘‘fact’’ … did

at one time fairly clearly mean (roughly) what ‘‘actual event’’

Truthmakers 19means’ (1962: 283).1 In keeping with the terminology of thevarious authors discussed in this book, I shall use ‘states ofaffairs’, ‘facts’, and ‘events’ interchangeably.

As already noted, Armstrong would say that (1)—that Fido is

brown—is made true by a state of affairs Russell (1985) wouldagree, saying that (1) is made true by a fact The state (of

affairs) or fact or event of Fido’s being brown is the most obvious

candidate But suppose, for the sake of argument, that that statecould have had different constituents Suppose, for example,

that Fido’s being brown could have been constituted by Fido and being black If that state had been constituted by Fido and

being black, then that state would have existed, and it would

have been true that Fido is black More to the point, that statewould have existed and (1) would have been false And if it ispossible for that state to exist and (1) to be false, then that state

1 Russell (1940) is an even nicer illustration, treating ‘fact’ and ‘event’ as onymous Nowadays, ‘fact’ typically means true proposition (or uncontroversially known proposition) Taking a fact to be a true abstract proposition goes back at least to Frege (1997b: 342) In 1904, Russell himself would have said that a fact was

syn-a true proposition, but only becsyn-ause he took true propositions to be (whsyn-at we would call) events (see Ch 8, §IV).

2 More carefully, if a state of affairs makes p true in virtue of the objects and

properties that constitute that state, then that state is not possibly constituted

by other objects and properties such that, possibly, if the state is constituted by

those objects and properties, then p is not true (For example, suppose that the state of Fido’s being brown makes that Fido is brown or black true It does not follow that being brown is an essential constituent of that state What follows, instead, is that that state is not possibly constituted by any property other than being brown

or being black.) I shall ignore this qualification in the text For, even given this

qualification, Truthmaker has a ‘controversial consequence’ about the essential constituents of states of affairs, which, as we shall see, is the main point here.

20 Truthmakers

some states jointly make a claim true, the constituents of thosestates that play a role in making that claim true are themselvesessential to their respective states

With this in mind, consider the wide variety of propertiesand objects that must be essential constituents of the state (orstates) that is (or are) the truthmaker (or joint truthmakers)

for that Murphy’s thoughts about the argument on page 627 of his dog-eared copy of Leviathan, which thoughts occurred from 12:15 to 12:17 on October 1, 2004, were confused at the beginning yet, through fits and starts, managed to make legitimate if moderate progress in four areas, those four areas being …

Indeed, even a relatively simple truth might have an

extreme-ly complex truthmaker Consider, once again:

(1) Fido is brown

Some truthmaker theorists will deny that (1)’s truthmaker is the

state of Fido’s having the property of being brown, which state has Fido and being brown essentially For some will insist on a

‘sparse’ theory of properties, according to which the only realproperties are fundamental or primitive That is, they will insistthat the only real properties are not reduced to or analysed

in terms of other properties And any such philosopher willfollow Armstrong (1978: 17) and deny that being brown exists at

all, and so deny that being brown is a constituent of any state of

affairs

Given a sparse theory of properties, the truthmaker for(1) would have to be a complex state of affairs (or com-plex array of jointly truthmaking states of affairs) constituted

by a wide variety of fundamental properties and their tions one to another, which essentially constitute the state(or states) involved So the truthmaker for (1) might be noless convoluted than that for the above claim involving Mur-phy’s thoughts

rela-But whatever we conclude about the exact nature of (1)’struthmaker(s), I think we should join Armstrong and Russell

Truthmakers 21and others in saying that only a state (or states) of affairscould make (1) true.3 And so it goes for the truthmakers formany other truths Thus we have Truthmaker’s first contro-versial consequence: the world includes not only objects andproperties, but also states of affairs.

Suppose that (1)’s truthmaker is the state of Fido’s being

brown Then that state has both Fido and being brown as

essen-tial constituents Something similar goes for other truthmakingstates of affairs Thus Truthmaker’s second controversial con-sequence is that, for every truth involving objects, properties,and relations, there is some state (or states) constituted bythose objects, properties, and relations essentially

These controversial consequences show that Truthmaker is

a substantive thesis that needs to be motivated They also showthat, at least as far as (1) is concerned, Truthmaker outstrips itsprimary motivation After all, Truthmaker agrees that if (1) is

3 Armstrong’s principal argument for the existence of states of affairs is that they are needed for truthmaking (see, e.g., Armstrong 1997: 116–19; but see also Armstrong 2004: 48–9) Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith (1984) make do with tropes or individual property instances in place of states of affairs.

They would say that the trope of Fido’s brownness, by its mere existence, guarantees

( 1)’s truth But I shall focus on Russell’s and Armstrong’s approach to truthmaking Their approach has been the more influential, perhaps because states of affairs

or events are less controversial than tropes (And even Mulligan, Simons, and Smith (1984: 295–6) slide between tropes and states of affairs in their account of truthmakers.)

Besides, my arguments regarding states of affairs as truthmakers can always

be adapted to tropes For example, this section will point out that Truthmaker has a controversial ontological implication and a controversial modal commit- ment; and it will say that this implies that Truthmaker outstrips its primary motivation That point is made with states of affairs But the same point could

be made with tropes: if Truthmaker relied on tropes, it would imply, first, that tropes exist and, second, that they are essentially tropes of the entity of

which they are actually tropes (If Fido’s brownness could be the brownness of

Spot, then the mere existence of that trope would not necessitate the truth

of that Fido is brown; see Armstrong 1989b: 117–18.) Here is another example.

§IV argues that Truthmaker must say that some (alleged) properties may not constitute truthmaking states of affairs That argument can easily be adapted

to show that Truthmaker must deny a truthmaking role to certain (alleged) tropes.